garbled

adjective

gar·​bled ˈgär-bəld 

: made unclear or confusing : distorted or mixed up

a garbled message

garbled speech

… scientific cranks—those folks who concoct garbled and grandiose pseudo-scientific theories …

—Robert W. Wilson

A garbled group of syllables came over the speaker.

—Tom Clancy

But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day drive from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled fading memory.

—Herman Wouk

Since the algorithm relies on the absolute accuracy of everything it has read to build the file, garbled information could lead to any number of mistakes.

—Paul C. Schuytema

Examples of garbled in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Pierre Huyghe’s Idiom, 2024, provides a similarly disarming experience, comprising a gold mask that recalls relics from ancient Greece, but which houses an artificial-intelligence program that generates garbled language in real time in response to sounds in the gallery, including visitors’ prompts. —Tim Griffin, Artforum, 1 Dec. 2025

In fact, the core messages can get garbled if the media can’t keep up with the intended meaning. —Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 27 Oct. 2025

The strategy always involves the same ingredients: The message, called the plaintext, gets distorted (the encryption) so that anybody who intercepts it sees only garbled gibberish (the ciphertext). —Jack Murtagh, Scientific American, 22 Oct. 2025

Signing into the service — a process accompanied by a noisy, garbled series of computerized tones that sounded like a drowning robot — became a rite of passage. —Rob Wile, NBC news, 30 Sep. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1757, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for garbled

• marbled